I was just at the Native instruments website, I was blown away by how realistic the demo’s sound for Kontakt.
If you go to the page for that product you can hear music created (usually emulating real instruments) in a variety of genres with this VST.
It is a huge library of samples that comes with the sampler and I am very tempted buy the fact that all NI products are half price this weekend. So my question to the forum is this:
Assuming you know Cubase well, and assuming you can play your MIDI controller well (Keys and/or guitar) what kind of learning curve is involved in getting sequencer tracks made with a high quality sampler to the level of realism that can be heard in the product demos.
I assume that there must be more to it than pick the right patch and then compose and play well. I imagine that there would be a lot of tweaking and editing and learning how to do so. Or is a simple as pick a good patch and play well and it will sound real.
I am looking to get a sense of what kind of time commitment is involved in getting those real real sounding emulations going.
learning curve ?
buy a real hardware sampler ,cheaper that plugin’s .something like the top of the range akai s6000 with usb card goes for £240 NOW THATS BARGAIN considering it was in excess of £2000 brand new . less strain on your processor ,individual outs, its own sound colour ,sod soft samplers get the real thing cheap !
You already know the answer to the question … It can take 10 seconds to load a patch, it can take 10 years to get it to do what you want and everything in between. There are zillions of options. You can use or ignore them. The more time you spend on it the more you’ll get out of it. This is true for DAWs, VSTi, mixers, pianos, guitars, banjos, cooking, programming, folding shirts. Pretty much true for everything but playing drums. For some reason practicing drums doesn’t do any good for some of us.
kontakt is a very powerful software sample player.(you can’t sample direcly into it, like most soft “samplers” excluding emulator x family). i come from a hardware sampler background (i still own an ancient, very complex yamaha tx16w). to me kontakt is ugly, but logical and powerful once you get used to it. you can’t just load up a patch and make it sound like the demos on n.i. website though.
you’d need years of recording,editing,mixing and above all, playing skills to do it. i have some of those things, but am a crap player!
the bundled library has some excellent sounds, and you cn edit them to suit your style.
in terms of expandability, kontakt seems the most popular platform these days.
p.s. i own machfive v1, emulator x/emulator x2, vsampler3 and halion v1. kontakt has been the best for me out of all of them. if you can get it cheaper than normal, go for it. i’m on 4, with kontakt 5 in the post…
ed
IMO, Kontakt alone isn’t worth it. If you want to emulate real instruments, you will need to buy third party libraries for given instruments. Some may use Kontakt player as their engine-but for playback, there is no more learning curve than any other VI. If you want to actually create samples and custom scripting-huge learning curve.
I use the Kontakt player for a number of libraries…LASS, Scarbee pianos, and Mojo Horns. BFD2 for drums. east West and VSL for strings/orchestral. NI’s old B4 for Hammond. atmosphere for synth pads. The included Kontakt samples are mostly like a good ROMpler, IMO. The magic is in the third party stuff.
No, Because many great libraries require full Kontakt. The reason for that is for small developers, licensing the Kontakt Player is prohibitively expensive. Buying full Kontakt is the better investment, as it doesn’t limit your options.
the benefit of having the full kontakt is that if you load in a sound that is nearly right, you can usually go in and tweak it until it fits better. this might mean changing note ranges, filters fx etc.
also, the full knotakt can import lots of other formats. i’ve used it to bring in emulator 3 banks, halion banks, soundfonts and machfive banks.
and of course, making sounds from scratch, looping,mapping etc.
if you really want something to make your own sounds with, it’s a sampler you need, not a rompler.
ed
(like EXS24, S1 SamplerOne, e.g.)
drag/drop from arrange (how nice would it be), 2x ADSR, 24 dB (hpf/bpf/lpf) filter, 2x lfo, auto mapping, auto looping/crossfade, 16 outs, and exs/kontakt-import…that´s it!
**- great for creativity and file transfer.
every daw today offers an onboard sampler.**
Dear Steinberg,
please have a look into the drawer where the halion code is already.